We use cookies to provide you with a better experience. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.
Growing from modest beginnings in 1948 as Harris Brothers of Saint Paul, Minnesota, to becoming one of the nation’s leading mechanical contractors, it’s safe to assume Harris knows how to pivot. And while there’s plenty of competition out there (Harris has worked side-by-side with some of the biggest and the best), not every mechanical contractor has invested quite so much in developing a dedicated, in-house team of designers, engineers and modeling specialists. So, what drove the decision to open the Harris Design Studio in 2020, and what is driving the Design Studio today, five years on?
One word: disruption.
“Disruption” has become one of the most easily recognizable buzzwords today, but it’s typically used as an aspiration or an aim, not an action. Industry leaders “want” to shake things up, new players on the scene “intend” to challenge the status quo.
What Harris gets right about disruption is that we know it doesn’t start in the marketing department. It starts in the mirror. Developing the Harris Design Studio was exactly that. It changed Harris so that Harris could change the game, investigating new strategies to mitigate or eliminate problems familiar to us all: from siloed teams and miscommunication to labor shortages, rapidly advancing technology, higher than ever client expectations and tightening timelines.
How do we do it? By making our mantra a call to action not just for ourselves but for our industry: Believe in Better. The Harris Design Studio refuses to believe that this industry’s shortcomings are impossible to fix. We insist that “the way it’s always been done” has both merit and can also make room for change.
Our team reflects the reality of our projects, work and industry, not a checklist of degrees and certifications. They’re a tapestry of thoughtful experts whose backgrounds include experience on the shop floor as often as in the halls of academia.
As a collective, we are not just a team of engineers kept far from the field. We’re problem-solving partners, internal advisers and colleagues. Our culture of accountability includes a list of “absolute imperatives” that ensure everyone on the team is empowered to get curious and ask the right questions. We collaborate early and often with stakeholders across all phases of a project, and in doing so, get everyone aligned to the same goal, reduce complexity, mitigate risk and bring stability to work that often feels chaotic and unpredictable. All this combined creates an atmosphere that feels absolutely kinetic. It’s invigorating. It’s inspiring. It reminds us that, yes, joy is found in the process of designing and building cool things, not just in the relief when the work is done.
Brief timeline
While design was the focus when the studio opened in 2020, its development went beyond just being an in-house design resource.
Building the right team was critical. Every hire had to not just understand, but share the desire to think differently; to see projects spring off a blank page, to lean into, rather than away from, highly conceptual designs and to zero in on what the client wants and needs for their facility.
With the right people on board, the next step was incorporating with the engineering group, who brought to the table their laser focus on making sure project documents meet the needs of field teams whose efforts would bring things together onsite. While creating designs to simultaneously prioritize client imperatives with construction realities, we were also developing our building environmental science team.
By digging deeper into building metrics and analyses, the building environmental science team gives the whole studio (and by extension, all of Harris) a much broader understanding of how each individual building works, allowing for even more specialized solutions.
The most recent development of the Harris Design Studio has been the incorporation and restructuring of our digital design teams. This puts our design modelers and our detailers from Building Information Modeling and Virtual Design and Construction into a single team. Pulling them together into a unified group allows the studio to define a scalable single workflow for whenever we get involved with a project while exploring the latest technologies such as four-dimensional simulations and even virtual reality design reviews.
One of the immediate benefits of the Harris Design Studio is the effect it’s had on the way Harris is now able to approach our extremely large and complex projects. Operating from one hub of communication, collaboration and activity, when Harris is brought into a project during its early stages, we can develop solutions that are readily fabricated and simpler to build, even with the fastest client timelines.
People (and passion) drive process enhancement
The Harris Design Studio can be credited to Harris CEO, Michel Michno.
“Disruption rarely comes from the inside, because it requires a fresh perspective and a departure from established norms, practices and business models,” Michno says, “We recognized the difference a resource like the Design Studio would make and wove it into our strategic plan. It’s been open for five years, but our executive leadership team spent at least that much time planning and experimenting to get it right. It was risky. It was different. It required us to question our workflows and find ways to bring additional value to our clients and partners, and it was absolutely worth it.”
Michno’s vision combined with the creative and entrepreneurial spirit driving Harris didn’t just enable big ideas and bold decisions, it demanded them.
It’s important to note that as proud as we are of the incredible milestones we’ve achieved, we can’t say we “disrupted from within” if we don’t give an indication of what that looked like.
As Michel states above, we took risks. We had to change the way we thought about everything, and we had to get buy-in from everyone in a company that was certainly not small or new to the game when we started this journey. There’s a learning curve that comes with change, and yes, it slows initial progress, which can be frustrating at first.
Not every risk we took was the right move. There had to be cultural shifts internally at Harris in our burgeoning department and across the whole company. Those shifts come with blocks that need active resolution. You can’t just tell consummate professionals with decades of skill and experience that they’re the old guard. You need allies, not adversaries. Plus, their insight and influence are extremely valuable even if not especially in the face of change.
So, if your culture is about people (and if it isn’t, you’re missing something huge), you must make sure they feel heard, valued and understood. We needed to re-examine the markets we were targeting, the audiences we were trying to reach and we had to build strategies for addressing resistance in the industry. There’s a lot of tradition in this business. There are tools, techniques and procedures that have been “the way it’s done” for longer than a large population in our workforce has even been alive. None of that came easily, but to requote Michel, it was absolutely worth it.
Design Build/Design Assist
The Harris Design Studio team has an intimate understanding of every phase in a construction project and vested interest in ensuring a smooth transition from the first to the last. It might be tempting to call Harris a “one-stop-shop,” but it’s more accurate to say we’re the mechanical contracting and service equivalent of a bespoke tailor. Not a custom tailor. Bespoke.
What’s the difference? Made to measure or made to order (“customized”) is still pre-designed and pre-assembled to some degree. When something’s bespoke, it’s built from scratch, with every consideration made to your specifications from color and style to breathability and range of motion.
That’s what the Harris Design Studio difference feels like. We’re tailors of bespoke building systems where the earlier we get involved, the fewer limitations there are on what’s possible.
A client’s order is just the beginning. We look at why they want what they want, how they’re going to use it, then both what they do and don’t need for those systems to function properly. Our solutions offer a new level of customer service that a shop full of “options” and “packages” can’t compete with. Bespoke means what clients get has been designed, built and maintained exclusively for them. That’s how we make every project “better.” It’s why Harris is well-positioned to excel at Design Build and heavy Design Assist projects. As an advisor and decision-maker on a project, we can see issues from far enough afield that solutions can be developed even before breaking ground.
An example is a recent government medical center project that required chiller replacement and cooling tower additions at its central plant. Previously, the chilled water system at this facility only used well water for heat rejection, no cooling towers.
As well water flow reduced over the years, cooling towers became a necessity to keep the building future ready. Originally, the scope of work was labor intensive, including individually sequencing chillers to be served tower water instead of well water and setting up parallel flow instead of series flow between chiller pairs. Proposed concepts accounted for a good number of switchover valves at each chiller, as well.
When Harris came on board with the Design Studio, we recognized individually sequencing those chillers was unnecessary overwork; it wouldn’t improve either equipment performance or operational reliability. On top of that, the design itself added complexity (and cost) that would make the whole project more difficult than it needed to be. (Sound familiar?) We submitted detailed reports to the general contractor and government client outlining solutions to optimize tower operation as well as annual chilled water demand load profiles, and when we got the green light, our recommendations resulted in not only cost savings but also a not insignificant boost in building performance and operation.
Effective, maximized prefab
Another benefit of streamlined communication and collaboration is maximized prefabrication. When we say Harris can prefab everything, we mean it, but with an important consideration.
Effective prefab relies on process automation, and your process automation is only going to be as good as the information fed into it. If you want that information to be the cream of the crop, you can’t plan things the way they’ve been planned in the past. Every delay straps a new limit to what mechanical contractors can prefabricate, where they can save and how many problems they can prevent.
This is, again, why it was such an intentional, strategic move to bring our BIM and VDC teams (at Harris we just use VDC) into the Harris Design Studio. We want VDC to be the backbone of communication for every facet of our company, indeed, in the industry.
Literally. VDC is the vehicle through which we develop and transfer information. It shows the detailed and defined systems modeled, it describes how we’re going to approach the work and put things together, how everything will sync up with work packages, how everything will get to our nationwide network of fab shops and how we will install it on the job site. Everything is in the model; go to one place for a complete picture of what we’re going to do. How well it works depends on how well we plan, and how well we plan depends entirely on how early we can start.
In our business, five years is barely a blink. As we look ahead to the day the Harris Design Studio gets to celebrate its first decade, we see a landscape dominated by technology driving productivity, quality and delivery to match industrialized construction principles. So, our people are always hungry for more knowledge, new tools and fascinating opportunities. We’re always looking for something to put our minds to that we haven’t seen before. Where do we go from here? Anywhere. Everywhere. As long as we’ve got the right minds in the right place with the right tools asking the right questions, the limits are hard to imagine.
People think disruption is about shock value and speed. It isn’t.
Real disruption is a long game, and it lives or dies by investment from the inside-out. You aren’t going to get through that kind of shift and growth if you aren’t driven by something stronger than whatever curve balls, false starts and hard lessons come at you. For us, that’s what our mantra, Believe in Better means. However, it’s not just a catchy slogan, it’s a lived experience that connects us all. It’s at the heart of everything we do and everything we deliver. We believe in a better culture across the construction industry, so we’re building it here at home. We believe better teams are a result of better leadership, so we’ve got internal programs that focus on developing soft skills in technically hard environments. We believe in a better, safer and more enjoyable experience from start to finish, for our teams, yes, but also for our partners, our subcontractors and our clients.
When it comes down to it, our work is “better” because to compete in our industry it has to be. That’s a cold, measurable fact. Especially now. The only way to truly stand out, drive conversations, influence markets and develop the next great piece of work, is by committing absolutely to delivering an experience that is better.
John Gregory Williams, senior vice president, Harris Design Studio, has spent the last two decades in the construction industry. Coming from a consultancy background, Williams is a natural influencer and thought leader whose expertise includes design engineering, project/design management and MEP/utilities engineering, with the ability to execute it all under extraordinary circumstances on extremely complex projects.